NBC hopes Super Bowl influence spreads

NEW YORK — NBC hoped the Super Bowl would prompt viewers to sample a couple of its promising new shows and, at least initially, the network is getting its wish.

The network premiered the second season of "The Voice" directly after Sunday's Super Bowl, which attracted a record-setting audience of 111.3 million viewers. The Nielsen company said that 37.6 million people hung around for its music competition series on Sunday.

Perhaps more importantly, an estimated 17.7 million people watched "The Voice" the next night. That's up 49 percent from the show's first season average of 11.9 million last year. It's also a larger audience than "American Idol" gathered for its second episode of the week last Thursday.

The premiere of "Smash," NBC's highly-publicized drama about life backstage at Broadway play rehearsals, had 11.5 million viewers on Monday. Those are the best ratings in the Monday 10 p.m. time slot for NBC since 2008.

Thanks to the Super Bowl, NBC's weekly average in prime-time was 21.4 million viewers (9.9 rating, 16 share). CBS had 8.4 million viewers (5.3, 9), Fox had 6.8 million (4.0, 6), ABC had 5.1 million (3.3, 5), the CW had 1.6 million (1.0, 2) and ION Television had 1.1 million (0.7, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with a 3.5 million viewer average (1.8, 3), Telemundo had 1.1 million (0.6, 1), Telefutura had 660,000 (0.3, 1), Estrella had 210,000 and Azteca 170,000 (both 0.1, 0)

NBC's "Nightly News" topped the evening newscasts with an average of 9.3 million viewers (6.2,11). ABC's "World News" was second with 8 million (5.3, 10) and the "CBS Evening News" had 6.5 million viewers (4.4, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox and My Network TV are units of News Corp. NBC and Telemundo are owned by Comcast Corp. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. Azteca America is a wholly owned subsidiary of TV Azteca S.A. de C.V.